The Rake Magazine

Category: Food and Drink

  • Sustainable Wine

    One would have thought it was impossible to pay too much for food. Life, after all, is not the same without it. Yet all over the developed world, farmers are hard up. The English newspapers made hay some weeks ago with a story about farmers’ wives in the Hardy Country, one of the most picture-postcard parts of Britain, who are obliged to advertise their charms on the Internet for the enjoyment of foreign tourists (“Come and Pluck an English Rose”) in order—if you will permit the expression—to make ends meet.

    Government subsidies, meant to solve the conundrum of keeping food cheap without making farmers impossibly poorer than their fellow countrymen, do nothing for Third World farmers, who are thus excluded from markets. Farm subsidies are not, in the final analysis, for the long-suffering farmer; they are for eaters who would rather spend money on something else. God alone knows the solution to this—how many economists does it take to change a lightbulb?

    But one can hardly hold up for admiration the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union (or whatever the Common Market is being called this week), even though more than forty-six percent of the official expenditure of the European Union goes toward agriculture. The Common Market started as a deal by which German industry paid for the picturesque traditions of French farming. They put the European Parliament at Strasbourg in Alsace to symbolize this concord. Whatever the symbolism, the practicalities are truly remarkable. For one week each month, the 626 members, their staff (who otherwise work in Brussels), their secretariat (based in Luxembourg), and their translators (into and out of eleven official languages) decamp to Alsace. Imagine moving the Minnesota Legislature up to Duluth one week in four, all the year round.

    Strasbourg is certainly central to Old Europe. Caught between the river Rhine in Germany and the Vosges Mountains in France, it enjoys a relatively dry and continental climate. It has been fought over by armies from East and West at least since the neo-pagan Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate defeated a Germanic confederation there in 357. After the war of 1870, Alsace became German (Elsass); in 1918 it became French once again. Hence the old joke about Alsace wine being made of German grapes using French methods—which means they do, or do not, wash their feet (adjust joke according to prejudice).

    It is true that many of the Alsace grape varieties, such as riesling and sylvaner, are also widely grown in Germany. Alsace is in fact the only part of France producing first-rate wine where the grape variety rather than the region is the most prominent item on a wine label. The grape most readily associated with Alsace is the gewürztraminer, a variety actually related to muscat grapes and made into wine with a strong smell of elderflowers, melons, or lychees (pick your own comparison), tasting remarkably like its own fresh grapes.

    As in Germany, some growers leave the best grapes on the vines until they grow the “noble rot” and are made into sweeter wines labeled “Vendange Tardive” (German Spätlese). But most Alsace gewürztraminer is made into table wine, clean, dry and spicy, fermented in steel rather than in oak, until all the residual sugar has been absorbed and the wine has a fresh bright finish. This is perhaps the only wine that can stand up to curry.

    It is certainly good with turkey. As it costs a fraction of what you would pay for the fine wines of Burgundy, the wine region closest to the southwest of Alsace, you might want to stock up on it in anticipation of Thanksgiving. I would not answer for its compatibility with marshmallow dip or lime jelly. So buy a bottle now and practice.

  • The Magical Fruit

    I had my chili epiphany in a bar in Dallas. Unlike some of my other saloon-supplied revelations, this one came not from the bourbon but from the crusty old dude on the next stool. I’d just asked for advice on the best local rib joint. After about an hour of discourse with details including serious analysis of the nuances of sauce and the names of the guys “rollin’ racks” behind the lines, my guy throws a head nod to the bartender and says, “But what you really want is a bowl of red.”

    Two steaming, heaping bowls of chili came out of the kitchen, and Crusty tucked into his without a word. As I’m asking him if this is the best in the area, he taps his spoon on the edge of my chipped bowl and says, “Eat the magic beans.” And truly, amid the beef and tomatoes swam the most flavorful and colorful combination of beans, some of which I had never seen before. We licked our bowls clean and chatted about the chili queens of San Antonio—who used to roll out their carts to the plazas at dusk with big steaming pots of chili—and about how Crusty loved the one with the green lamp and how she gave him magic beans.

    That night I could only dream about the beans I knew: green beans, soy beans, kidney, black, navy, lima. But with magic beans, it’s not so much what you know or don’t know, it’s what you don’t know you don’t know. You know?

    As one of the oldest cultivated crops, beans have been fortifying society since there was society. Evidence suggests that the peoples of Mexico and Peru were growing beans as far back as 7000 B.C. Chickpeas and fava beans have been found in Egyptian tombs dating back at least 4000 years, and around the same time soybeans were growing in parts of Asia.

    Legumes are plants characterized by edible seeds and pods or beans. This term replaced the word pulse, which you might see used in older cookery books by fancy people. All this naming is only slightly confusing when you consider there are roughly 14,000 species in the leguminusae family.

    The Great Common Bean (phaseolus vulgaris) began life in Mexico thousands of years ago. Spanish explorers brought it to Europe, where it thrived and made its way back to the New World in completely new forms. This amazingly enchanted bean is classified by its diverse colors and is known differently by many cultures. White beans include navy, soisson, white kidney, cannellini in Italy, and Boston baked beans in Beantown. Red beans go by all kinds of familiar names: kidney beans, chili beans, habichuelas, cranberry beans, and pinto beans, named for the painted ponies they resemble. Black beans, brown beans, and flageolets are also common.

    Chickpeas were named by the Romans for the “ram’s head” curl of the seed. They are also known as garbanzo beans and are said to increase sexual energy. Black-eyed peas most likely began in China and traveled with the tradesmen to Africa, then back to the Americas on the slave ships. The South’s traditional New Year’s “Hoppin’ John” dish is evidence of the migration. Pythagoras of ancient Greece forbade his followers to eat fava beans because they were said to contain the souls of the dead.

    Soybeans, maybe the Albus Dumbledore of magic beans, originated in Manchuria about 3000 B.C. These hard little rocks need more soaking than other beans, if you intend to eat them outright, but that’s not where their true magic lies. It’s in the salad oil and the sprouts. And the bond in chocolate, and the miso in soup. It’s in the tofu, the Tofurkey, and the bogus hot dogs and cheese you fool yourself with. It’s in the soy sauce that brings your fried bean curd to life. Soy is the “meat of the earth” and the miracle bean, and the magic is clear.

    But maybe beans aren’t so magical to you, because you fear them. All you’ve been thinking since you started reading this is: Beans, beans, the magical fruit, the more you eat, the more you toot. We’re not equipped to easily digest the complex sugars in beans. These sugars run into nasty little bacteria in the intestine, where they have a little party. The hungry buggers eat the sugars and give off gas. So, you see, it’s not really your fault; you just smell that way. Crazily enough, the more often you eat beans, the less you putt-putt. It’s only when you treat your bacteria to a splurge that you pay the price. Of course the answer is to eat more beans, because the more you eat the better you feel, so let’s have beans for every meal!

    What better way to attain the enchantment of beans than through your own bowl of red? Here’s a good basic shot at Crusty’s favorite bar chili: Sauté some onions and garlic in a big pot. Add a pound of beef and brown. Drain off the fat and season with chili powder, cumin, crushed red peppers, paprika, salt, and pepper to taste. Add two large cans of whole, peeled tomatoes. Add rinsed black beans, pinto beans, cannellini beans, and black-eyed peas. Let the whole mess simmer on low heat for about two hours, and let the magic smell waft through your house before tearing in.

  • Wine, wine, wine! Dreams and Responsibilities

    I hope you are enjoying the new Harry Potter. Such a wealth of invention. And so witty. No profound psychological penetration, I suppose, but who ever expected that in a school story or a murder mystery? J.K. Rowling may not be Jane Austen, but then neither is Dorothy Sayers (who made the error of falling in love with her detective) or P.D. James (so much blood, such clever use of the Book of Common Prayer), Edmund Crispin (the thinking man’s Dorothy Sayers), or Agatha Christie (of whom to say that she has cardboard characters is to attribute to cardboard an excess of sensation).

    Even without psychological subtlety, Rowling has conjured up wonderful characters. Anyone employed in education will recognize Professor Umbridge, an administrator from the Ministry of Magic who cannot herself teach her way out of a paper bag but is sent in to reform Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. “She drafted a bit of anti-werewolf legislation two years ago that makes it almost impossible for him to get a job,” says one professor about a brilliant colleague. The enemy of the Umbridges of this world is imagination.

    And that is what Rowling has in superabundance. This is not teenybopper novelty-shop witchcraft. Still less is it the nasty world of black masses and witches’ sabbaths. I have never heard anyone miss a point so comprehensively as the earnest, amiable, and literal-minded evangelist on NPR who objected to the Harry Potter tales as promoters of the black arts by quoting sentences out of context, treating the novels in fact in the way that some people treat their Bibles—as if they were instruction manuals for lawn mowers. The bishop of London caught the spirit of the thing when he said he would happily appoint a chaplain for Hogwarts any day Professor Dumbledore requested one.

    Of course, not every exercise of the imagination is good. Films like The Patriot propagate a view of the American Revolution that fails to acknowledge it as a civil war between two sets of American colonists, and so perpetuates hostility toward foreigners (and lobsters) that the world might be better off without. Braveheart irresponsibly fomented political hatred within the United Kingdom (think how well it did at the box office).

    Yet Harry Potter generates sheer eutrapelia (handy word, that). It recalls the playful Roman poet Ovid. Scarcely surprising, seeing that Rowling (like The Rake himself) was a Latin major in college. Now she is the richest woman in England, richer than the Queen, God bless her (both of them).

    Which just shows that imagination has practical consequences. In dreams begin responsibilities. Byron dreamed that Greece might yet be free. His dream formed part of the Grand Design or Big Idea that made Greece, in 1829, the first independent nation to be carved out of the old Ottoman Empire. The consequences of the long, slow disintegration of that Empire we are still living with, not least in Iraq.

    Half a century after Greek independence, in Thessaloniki, then an Ottoman city, Yiannis Boutari founded the wine concern that still bears his name. Of course, Greeks have been making wine ever since Homer’s heroes sailed the wine-dark sea. But only recently did it become commercially available in glass bottles like Boutari’s.

    There is something of the smell of a wooded Greek hillside about the red wine they make in the Naoussa in northern Greece, fifty miles from Thessaloniki. The grape is called xinomauro, which is Greek for acid black. Ancient and modern Greeks alike call red wine black—after all, it only looks red in a glass. Sure enough Boutari Naoussa is a good dark-ruby color. The taste is robust, not unlike cabernet, and the price, about $12, is a good value.

    No need to clutter your appreciation by recalling that this comes from the same area as Alexander the Great—the man with the grandest designs in all the ancient world. Taste is its own idea. The taste buds are, after all, the swiftest messengers on the royal road from reality to the imagination.

  • The War of the Wheaties

    Wheat is under attack. Not from nasty-toothed beetles or fungus-ridden blight. This attack is more sinister, more devastating, because it comes from those once whole-heartedly on wheat’s side. The traitors are none other than the very same nutritionists who used to harp on you to eat your whole-wheat toast.

    Wheat and all its lovely products have fallen out of fashion lately with the food conscious. Apparently its complex carbohydrates are unseemly and inappropriate in the bizarro world manipulated by Dr. Atkins. You can feel the panic from the National Wheat Growers as their website flaunts study after study debunking the high-protein/no-carb diet fads. They’re practically shouting, “Amber waves of grain, people! Not amber waves of beef!”

    And get ready for a bigger shock, because your bread and cereal is not only trying to make you fat, but it may also be trying to kill you. The wheat- allergic types have organized a strong faction lately, creating a niche market for gluten-free products. To these folks, gluten (the protein in wheat) is the spawn of the devil. But really, what has wheat done to deserve this slander? What has wheat done to you lately? You’ve known it for so long as a solid staple, a warm, crusty slice of health. Maybe the question should be: What has wheat done for you? And the answer would be: not much but build a couple of cities by a big river.

    Wheat is a cereal grain that’s existed since the Paleolithic times. Einkorn, a type of coarse-grained wheat and the ancestor of all modern varieties, originated in southeastern Turkey ten thousand years ago. By the dawn of recorded history, wheat was abundant in Asia and Europe and was the most esteemed of cereals, as evidenced by the name “wheat” itself, which refers to the prized whiteness of the flour. Not indigenous to the Americas, it somehow made its way across the pond, and today between sixty million and sixty-three million acres of wheat are harvested in the U.S. each year.

    Wheat grows in thirty thousand varieties, but of the hundreds produced in the U.S., six classes can be distinguished. These classes are determined by the time of year planted and harvested, and by the kernel’s hardness, color, and shape. Each class has its own distinctions and characteristics. Hard red winter wheat has good baking qualities, and hard red spring has the highest percentage of proteins. Soft red winter is good for flatbreads, durum is used in semolina for pasta, hard white is good for yeast breads, and soft white is best in bakery products other than bread. And wheat doesn’t stop at the flour mill; it can also be puffed, flaked, or rolled to make your favorite breakfast cereals.

    It was one Cadwallander C. Washburn who saw the amazing potential of wheat when, in 1866, he built his first mill by St. Anthony Falls. Named the Washburn “B” Mill, it was dubbed “Washburn’s Folly” by critics who thought there was no way that demand for Midwestern wheat would ever match the output potential of such a mill. But wheat stood strong. By 1880, the Washburn and Crosby Company had perfected and revolutionized the milling process, creating a flour worthy of a gold medal at the International Millers’ Exhibition. The aptly named Gold Medal Flour is still the number-one brand in America.

    Meanwhile, across the river, a New Hampshire man who knew nothing about milling thought he might have a go at it. From the old run-down mill he purchased, Charles Pillsbury and family managed to turn a profit the very first year. In 1900, Pillsbury held its first recipe contest to promote its flour, offering prizes up to $680. Did you know the current winner of the Pillsbury Bake-Off wins $1 million?

    Minneapolis became known as the “Flour Milling Capital of the World.” The Washburn “A” Mill was the largest and most innovative mill in the world, grinding enough flour to make twelve million loaves of bread a day. The city flourished as the mills used the railways to bring in grain from all over the country. Milled flour was sent to Duluth and points east for distribution and export around the globe. The city’s population jumped from 13,000 in 1870 to 165,000 by 1890.

    The Washburn and Crosby Company became General Mills, which by virtue of good old Midwestern fiscal thinking not only survived but thrived during the Great Depression. They continued to innovate and push boundaries, like when someone dropped some bran gruel on a hot stove and accidentally created Wheaties. Or like the time when their mechanical division created bombsights and precision control instruments for the army in World War II. Yeah, that was fun. They also facilitated the creation of the “black box” used to record flight data, conducted hot air balloon experiments during the Cold War, and helped create the submarine used to explore the Titanic. All of this because of wheat.

    If you want to watch the impact of wheat on a daily basis, check out the Minneapolis Grain Exchange. Since 1880, the MGEX has made wheat a money player on the world scene. The futures pit is madness with method, controlled chaos as the traders still use “open outcry” to sell futures and options. As the only contract market for hard red spring wheat, the MGEX trades around four thousand contracts daily.

    But to really grasp the position of wheat and its role in the city and the world, you’ll have to check out the Mill City Museum, opening this month. It sits within the ruins of the Washburn “A” Mill and fully explains how Minneapolis came to be the breadbasket of our country. Maybe while sitting at the museum’s Wheat Street Café by D’Amico, you’ll see that fads may come and go, and times may get harder before they get better, but you can’t beat wheat.

  • Hands Across the Ocean

    Though it is nearly 20 years ago now, some of us are old enough to remember the Official Preppy Handbook. It told girls called Muffy how to adjust their pearls, push pennies into their penny loafers and pursue men in tartan trousers (which they called plaid pants).

    The other day I came across the British equivalent, the Sloane Ranger Handbook (Sloane Square is a smart part of London, near Harrod’s grand emporium). From it, Caroline and Henry Sloane discover how to get green Wellington boots, where to study Cordon Bleu cookery, and which pack of hounds to hunt foxes with. For Americans, it offers a rare chance to consider whether our two great nations are divided by more than a common language.

    They are. What the great Augustine would call the “loves” of Sloanes and Preppies are quite distinct. Consider attitudes to the land; in England rural is smart, in America it means hick. Or think of smell. Caroline and Henry think it sad that Americans do not smell of anything. All those showers kill smell dead; far better to wallow in a steamy bath. Caroline married Henry largely on account of his smell, a delicious amalgam of pipe smoke, Labradors, and old leather.

    The English simmer (where I write) is ripe with aromas. I do not refer to the overpowering stench of prevarication emerging from a government that persuaded many Members of Parliament to vote for its war in Iraq by announcing we could all be blown up at 45 minutes notice by Saddam Hussein’s Weapons of Mass Destruction. The public has a strong sense that if Her Majesty’s ministers were so sure these large but elusive weapons existed, they ought at least to be able to say where they are. This is a smell that will not go away anytime soon.

    Thank God there are pleasanter airs abroad. Freshness rises from the pale green grass of the aftermath, where the crows are pecking among the bales of new-mown hay. The sweet peas are flowering, as powerful as brandy, as honeyed as Sauternes. But perhaps the most characteristic smell comes from the black currants—not blackberries, the autumn fruit that looks like raspberries dipped in ink, but black currants, Ribes nigrum, like small cranberries, growing on thornless bushes with leaves like vines.

    In the sunshine, they are as pungent as skunks but a whole pile pleasanter, slightly oily (reminiscent, in fact, of the oil boys used to drip onto their electric trains), sweet, sour, and fruity all at the same time. Wine made from the sauvignon blanc grape, especially Pouilly-Fumé from the Loire in western France, is often said to smell of black currants.

    The black currant is the most widely grown fruit in Europe. John Tradescant the Elder brought it to England from Central Europe in the early 17th century, in time for it to be transported to the American colonies. It has never been widely grown in America.

    Forestedge Winery in Laporte, Minnesota, however, is said to be adding black currant to its range of wines made from local soft fruit and berries. Look out for it.

    In the meantime, try a summer aperitif called Kir. Quarter-fill a wine glass with crème de cassis, the liqueur made in Burgundy from black currants and far too sticky to drink on its own. Top it with dry white wine. In Burgundy, they use aligoti (the name of a grape), but you could try anything white, dry, and light. With champagne it becomes Kir Royale. Watch the pretty pink swirls, like marble in motion, then sip judiciously as the sun sinks, the loon calls, and the dog falls into the lake for the nth time (where n is a large whole number).

    Kir is named after a priest from Burgundy, Canon Kir, a hero of the resistance and then for many years, in the Fourth Republic, mayor of Dijon. The good canon’s name may be seen on the bottles of the premixed version of Kir, but if you cannot find them, it is easy to mix your own. There are few fruitier ways of keeping down the bill for preprandial libation. Besides, it stretches a hand of friendship across the Atlantic, and that cannot be bad.

  • Hardcore Corn

    Outside Minnesota, the month of August has nary a holiday. Many people just let the hot, humid month hang there, lazily dipping its toes off the dock. But here, we know August shimmers like the last few grains of sand falling through the hourglass, telling us our time in the sun is waning. So we celebrate life and our own holidays with “the fest,” not the Great Minnesota Get-Together parking extravaganza, but the local fair, the carnival in the church parking lot. The one where your softball team and the mayor dress as clowns and chuck candy at kids.

    For me, it was Corn Days in Long Lake, where our corner was prime squatting for the parade, my sister was a Corn Princess, and for two days you could eat all the corn you could handle for $1.50. The night before the fest, I would ride my bike to church and help shuck the corn, husks and silk flying through the warm evening air. The next day we’d sit in the grass with butter glossing our faces and kernels jammed in our braces as we watched the boys to see who got cuter over the summer. The taste of a hot, plump, buttery cob is inextricably tied to the feelings of those last heady days of summer—of contentment and divine satisfaction.

    If you believe as I do that corn is a heavenly gift that brings farm boys to roadside stands with heaping pickups, we’re not the first. Some ancient tribes believe that the Creator gave the People one last gift before placing them on Mother Earth—four kinds of corn. Yellow from the South for the advent of spring and new life; red from the West for long lives with the sun; white from the North for strength; and blue from the East for wisdom and understanding. The People were instructed to be corn’s caretakers and to use corn for food, medicine, and prayer. Judging by the fact that corn now grows on every continent except Antarctica, the People have done their job.

    Corn, or maize, as most of the planet knows it, is actually in the grass family, despite its omnipresence in veggie medleys. This grass is differentiated from its relatives by the large seed heads (cobs) and shorter growth rate, but it’s still considered a cereal crop. The origination of this crop is believed to be in the Americas, and archaeologists have found evidence that it predates humans in some regions.

    A smite of controversy surrounds the global dissemination of maize, whether it be pre- or post-Columbian, and no one can actually track how it came to exist all over the planet. For a Midwesterner, it can be a bit odd to see long waving cornfields outside of Bangkok, but where else would they get the baby corn they love so much? It took the Europeans awhile to warm up to the cob. Knowing it mainly as feed for the swine, the Parisian guests of Alice B. Toklas called her a savage for trying to feed it to them.

    Despite the kernel’s long history, its mysteries are still being unlocked. Did you ever notice that there are always an even number of rows on a cob? Or that there is one piece of silk for every kernel? So far, we’ve discovered more than 3,500 uses for corn or corn products, including chewing gum, icing, fireworks, ethanol, antibiotics, soap, paint, vitamins, and film. One bushel (56 pounds) of corn can produce enough sweetener for 325 cans of pop, oil for two pounds of margarine, enough starch for a ton of paper, or 15 pounds of carbon dioxide fizz in soft drinks. And consider the beautiful mysteries behind the liquid corn of Kentucky, where a good day is spent sippin’ mash and talkin’ trash.

    It’s possible that your personal summer corn fest comes without the cob. Maybe you enjoy your niblets freed and scooting around a plate. Maybe it’s hot-from-the-oven cornbread you crave, or huitlacoche, a corn-fungus delicacy in Mexico. You could be a polenta freak, or a corn-flake junkie who pours corn syrup on morning cereal. Whether it’s hush puppies or corn pone, tamales or tortillas, you are not alone.

    Chef Rachel Rubin of Bobino is really just a Peruvian girl with nothing but love for the ear o’ plenty. Her menu last month included grilled young corn to accompany the octopus ceviche. Pop in to see what she’s planning this month with the organic fresh corn she gets in weekly. If you want to try the cob with something different, eat it Elote style, like they do at the Burrito Mercado in St. Paul. A fresh hot ear of corn is smothered with queso fresco (fresh cheese) and a sprinkle of chipotle. But if you can, try to eat it Katharine Hepburn style: Walk up to a stalk, pluck and shuck, and dig right in. As the late great Kate believed, 10 minutes off the stalk and it’s a whole other ballgame.

    To make sure you understand the truly magical properties of corn, in some August of your life, make a pilgrimage to the maize mecca of Mitchell, South Dakota, and view the world’s only Corn Palace. It’s really a drive away from a cold winter with no corn memories.

  • Home and Abroad

    Imperialists come in all shapes and sizes. Some claim their god gave them the right to take away other people’s land and market the produce of their orange groves. Others never visit the places or people whose lives they dominate through the sale of brown sticky drinks and their cinematic equivalent.

    And then there are the unlikely ones, such as the poet Catullus. In the middle of the first century B.C. Rome was taking on territory at a greater rate than ever before. It was the custom for young men who aspired to a political career (or whose fathers aspired to one for them) to spend a year or more in a province as an honorary attaché on the governor’s staff, picking up tips, both informative and financial. Catullus did not find the wide plains of what is now northwestern Turkey at all to his liking. He was clearly happier in a sleazy pub off the Forum in Rome (“salax taberna,” as in “salacious tavern”), even if he did accuse its regulars of rogering his lady love Lesbia, “than whom no woman will ever be more greatly loved.” He was especially bitter about a Spaniard called Egnatius who favored as a dentifrice (so Catullus claimed) a fluid for the production of which he held, shall we say, an unassailable monopoly. [Uh, his own urine.—Editors]

    Perhaps Catullus could have learned to like living abroad for his country. One thinks of that remarkable generation of British Arabists who tried to put the Near East back on its feet after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of the First World War. Hamilton, who engineered the Hamilton Road through the Zagros Mountains, the first road to link Persia with northern Iraq, was perhaps a natural for strenuous service. Lawrence, too, of course. But less so Canon Wigram who spent years living in the remote mountain villages of the Assyrian Christians, not proselytizing but providing every kind of help—medical, liturgical, typographical, political.

    Still less, one might have thought, Gertrude Bell. When that formidable lady first came to the East it was to fall in love with a young diplomat under the plane trees of the British Legation in Teheran and to translate the wine-and-roses poems of Hafiz, the Persian national poet. Yet she learned to travel rough, to do astounding amounts of pioneer work in Byzantine and early Islamic archaeology (she was the power behind the Baghdad Museum, the one recently looted) and to become the trusted political counselor of the first King of independent Iraq (while remaining resolutely against Votes for Women at home).

    The memoirs written by this generation shine with love of the Levant, the land, its languages, its people. Try Sir Arnold Wilson’s S.W. Persia or Hamilton’s Road through Kurdistan (and if it’s you that has my copy of the latter, please could I have it back). Alas, it will have been papers precisely of this period that were lost in the holocaust of the Iraqi National Archives horrifyingly described by Robert Fisk in the last week of the recent war.

    Gertrude Bell died in Baghdad. Catullus sailed a yacht back from Asia Minor, down the Bosporus, past Byzantium, through the Greek islands, up the Adriatic. He made his homecoming not to Rome, but to northern Italy, where his family lived. The yacht was allowed a serene retirement on the limpid waters of Lake Garda. No serene retirement for young Catullus. He went on writing, riling other poets, especially Julius Caesar’s Chief Engineer, a multifutuent but incompetent versifier whom Catullus liked to call Mentula, (crudely translated by the late Professor Swanson as Mantool and by the witty James Michie as John Thomas). Catullus’s father invited Caesar to dinner when the great man was in northern Italy and made his son apologize.

    One does not know what they drank, but the enterprising firm of Bitari has invented a pleasant red wine grown in the hills near Verona, the poet’s home, and named it after him. Catullo is 60 percent Cabernet (not a grape one associates with this part of the world) and 40 percent Corvino (which one does—it is the main variety in Valpolicella). The blend is mighty successful; my friend the wine merchant, with whom I discussed a bottle of this one sunny evening, thought it tasted rather like Pinot Noir, which is to say that it slipped down all too quickly, promoting pleasure more than thought and pastime with good company. Order it at your salax taberna, or take it to the lake and listen to the water chuckling up against the dock sharing your pleasure at being home.

  • Vanilla, Vanilla, Baby!

    He’s so vanilla, she said. She meant he was plain and simple, an accountant type with no spark, not an artist. She meant he was boring and uninventive, without passion and not worth my time. But when food is your language, definitions begin to skew. I understood her to mean he was delicious and seductive in ancient and darkly mysterious ways. That he remained unique while cultivating a universal appeal, worldly yet homey. That he was an artist and could show me the sweet nuances of life, all the while smelling like freshly baked cookies. If he truly was vanilla, he was certainly worth my time.

    In point of fact, it’s hard to find anyone who truly doesn’t like vanilla. Some of us (although not the majority) go for the zanier ice cream flavors, but that’s hardly a full rejection of vanilla itself. Have you ever come across anyone on a strict vanilla-free regimen? On the contrary, vanilla seems to be doing a bit of a spotlight dance lately. Witness the vanilla flavoring in high-end vodkas, leading to vanilla martinis in fashionable hands across the land. Vanilla Coke, while marketing to a new generation, is really reviving an old classic, though I think it tastes like liquid frosting. And in the past decade vanilla has become a signature scent among marketers who peddle candles and perfumes for enticing the opposite sex. All this from a “plain and simple” plant?

    The Totonaca people of the Vera Cruz region of Mexico have long known the divine properties of vanilla. Their ancestors were the first to cultivate the crop. They believed it to be a gift from the gods, with a mythology surrounding a pair of fallen lovers whose sacred blood marked the spot where a strong vine and beautiful flower grew to fill the air with the aroma of true love and beauty.

    The lovely flower is what links vanilla to the vast family of orchids, of which vanilla is the only edible fruit produced. It starts with the climbing vine that is pruned and trained to keep within reach of workers. After three years, the vine is ready to bear the small, trumpet-shaped celadon orchids. These temperamental flowers bloom for one day and must be fertilized in order to produce vanilla beans. Fortunately not all the flowers open on the same day, but over a period of a few months. In Mexico, the native Melipone bee took on the Herculean task of pollination—creating a 300-year monopoly on its home turf. It wasn’t until the 1800s that hand pollination took over and opened up markets all around the world. The plant is sustainable within a 20-degree band around the equator. Today Madagascar and Indonesia grow the best and the most vanilla, with Tahiti following close behind.

    The vanilla pods are ready for harvesting six to nine months after pollination. Growers need to have a bit of a gambling soul, because the longer they leave the bean on the vine, the bigger the pod and the more valuable the crop. But they risk that pesky old burr in the behind, vanilla rustlers! Somebody might sneak into camp and liberate those pods before you wake up. Robbery was so bad in Madagascar that growers began to brand the green pods with markings that survived the curing process.

    It’s only after the curing process that the beans take on distinct flavors and aromas that differ so greatly among varieties. Like wine, vanilla nuances are affected by climatic differences, soil composition, and processing techniques. Mexican vanilla comes from indigenous plant stock and has a very smooth and creamy flavor. Bourbon vanilla originated from the same plant stock of Mexico, but was cultivated in the Bourbon Islands off Africa; this is the familiar and the most commonly used vanilla in extracts. Indonesia is the second largest producer of vanilla, with a vanilla that is woody, astringent and phenolic. Tahitian vanilla comes from the same Mexican stock, but has mutated over time into a separate species that is distinct in its own right. Tahitian vanilla tends to be sweeter and fruitier with a fatter bean and more floral fragrance than the other vanillas.

    This worldly vision of vanilla might be shocking to those who know it only as the small brown extract bottle nestled in the cupboard between the baking powder and the cinnamon. But originally, it was all about the bean—extracts have only been available for the last 100 years. The first vanilla extracts were made by pharmacists searching for stomach soothers. Variations on the bean now include vanilla flavoring, imitation vanilla, vanilla paste, vanilla powder, double strength extract, etc.

    But people these days are looking back to the bean. Definitely more expensive than the extract, the long dried pods look like something out of a voodoo recipe. To get at the good stuff you must delicately slice open the dried pod and scrape out the seeds into whatever concoction you choose. The sweet, damp darkness holds much of the flavor, but the pod still embraces its own fragrances and can be used for many more infusions.

    Vanilla sugar is one of those rare treats from the bean. Chopped vanilla infuses granulated sugar with the mellow and soft tones of the pod, making your morning coffee and cereal a divine revelation. The locally made Golden Fig’s version seems perfectly balanced and can be used in baking and cooking, or dabbed behind the ear.

    In past years, Mexican vanilla has fallen on hard times, with much of the former growing region dedicated to oil wells and orange groves. But a group of growers are working to re-establish ancient land rights and ritual techniques. These boutique vanillas are aiming to re-educate the world about the story of vanilla and many of them offer a unique vacation opportunity to witness firsthand the production of the sweet nectar of the gods.

  • No Tyrants’ Tipple

    Freud and Strauss offer contrasting impressions of the nightlife of old Vienna. Hitler painted a verbal picture of the same city as it was seen by those who could not afford Sacher Torte and waltzes, let alone dream therapy with the good doctor, those for whom the opera (the solemnities of Wagner, one gathers, rather than the gaiety of the Gipsy Baron) could be only a very occasional indulgence. Mein Kampf is a book more reviled than read. It certainly earns the revulsion. Like most emetics that really deliver, the effect is gradual. The reader is invited to pity the poor painter, scraping a living as a builder’s laborer, excluded from art school by the shortcomings of the education system. Slowly it emerges that it is all someone else’s fault, the Jews, the unions, the Hapsburg monarchy, parliamentary procedure, you name it. Cringing self-pity metamorphoses effortlessly into snarling resentment and contempt. This is as unhappy a study in the mental genesis of tyranny as you are likely to find. One doubts if Hitler could ever have painted bold bright landscapes like those of Churchill.

    Hitler, as is well known, was not keen on wine (though his ambassador to London, von Ribbentrop, had an earlier career as a champagne salesman). Other tyrants have been less teetotal. Saddam Hussein, despite being a Muslim, had a favorite wine. It is a liquid which many of us remember from those anxious years between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP, when bepimpled youth wished to do the right thing by the lady they were entertaining, but did not know if the right thing was red or white. Yes, Mateus Rosé, sweetish, pink, faintly fizzy, to look at not unlike the colored carbonated water some dentists give you to disguise the blood when you “wash out now please.” Maybe you still have one of the dumpy bottles, stoppered with a light bulb, caked in oodles of candle grease.

    One ought not to suggest guilt by association. Some of my best friends have moustaches. The taste of Mateus Rosé is at least consistent, even if I am not an admirer. But it is a pity that it is by far the best known table wine from Portugal, a land of many interesting grape varieties and vintages. There is Vinho Verde, a white wine which is indeed green and fresh in taste and color, as the name suggests. And recently I enjoyed a really heartening bottle of Portugese red, Quinta do Crasto 2000, named after the vineyard which clings to the vertiginous slopes of the valley of the River Douro in the north of the country and conveniently available in the valley of the upper Mississippi for substantially less than $20.

    The Douro valley is, of course, the area from which port comes, and this red table wine is made from some of the same grapes as port, Tinta Roriz, Tinta Barocca, Touriga Francesa, and Touriga Nacional (the names are as evocative as those of old English apple varieties—listen to Bramley Seedling and Worcester Pearmain, James Greave and Ribstone Pippin). Port, though, stays sweet because its fermentation is arrested. The yeasts get busy in the barrel turning the sugars into alcohol only to have their activities curtailed by the fortifying addition of substantial quantities of brandy. The sugars sit back and let the resulting blend mature into the noblest of all dessert wines.

    Quinta do Crasto table wine lacks the sweetness of port, but has much of its nobility. The wonderful dark color is matched by a magnificent dark taste, which not only fills the mouth but swells up into the soft palate and the sinus, making you puff out your moustache (if any) like a walrus. There is soft tannin, enough to give good road-holding qualities, and a slight tang of fresh apples, enough to induce salivation but no sharpness. This is well-balanced wine.

    Take it this summer if you are asked to the better sort of barbecue. With the help of a small steak, a baked potato and Savoy cabbage (you know, the crinkly kind) lightly steamed with a knob of butter, it lifted me out of the miry slough of Hitler’s prose. “Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear, gallantry and gaiety and grace.” The answer to tyranny must, I suppose, be hope.

  • Best of the Wurst

    Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s food poetry is some of the most beautiful ever written. He transformed tomatoes into heavenly beings. His ode to wine should be every serious vintner’s mantra. Even ordinary and unpoetic subjects—the artichoke or conger chowder—receive his divine dressings. But as far as my searches have revealed, Neruda seems to have skipped the sausage. Does the tubular treat filled with tasty meat offend? Does it lack in characteristics worth lauding? Is the sausage so unapologetically phallic as to render sausage prose better suited to public bathroom walls than to literary antiquity? Still, I feel Neruda was remiss in ignoring the opportunity to glorify one of the most prolific foods created by man.

    Strange and ugly though it may be—with its pale skin and lumpy contents—the sausage is something most people would rather not do without. What would summer be without a tasty bratwurst? Some of us can’t enjoy a ballpark game without a jumbo frank. Even the health-conscious have a hard time turning down the occasional link when cruising the brunch buffet. How can you not love a slice of something named mortadella, the sausage of death? A food adopted by almost every culture and created over and over with differing shapes, flavors and techniques, defined by the people who love it, deserves some consideration. I think it was Jimmy Dean who said, “My sausage, my country.”

    Sausage is more or less a minced-meat mix stuffed into a tubular casing, and the practice of making it is thought to have originated with the concept of “saving the rest of the pig to eat later.” So winning did the technique prove that it was soon adapted for different situations, thereby changing the definition of a sausage and its composition.

    First the filling. We may think first of pork or beef, but fish sausages have been around just as long. (And the sausage-loving Brits make one filled with cheese and leeks but no meat.) Second, sausage isn’t always tubular. That Scottish dare of a delicacy, haggis, is round, since its casing is usually the sheep’s stomach. And casing itself is the third factor. Natural casing may come from various areas of the animals interior, not just the intestines. Artificial casing can come from animals or plants. And some sausages are made with no casing at all, formed into a cohesive shape held together by composition.

    These variables contribute to a complex and fascinating world of portable treats, but most sausages can be lumped into one of three categories. Fresh sausages are made of raw meat and need to be cooked before eating. Cured sausages have some raw meat, but have been dried or cured and are intended for keeping and slicing (think salami). And last, cooked or partially cooked sausages are either sliced and eaten cold or heated.

    But, let’s face it, casing or no, jumbo salami or lil’ smokie, it’s what’s inside that counts. It’s the red pepper flakes or touch of fennel, the mingling of veal and pork or trace of cumin that create sausage memories—and distinct sausagieres. At Kramarczuk Sausage Co. in northeast Minneapolis, the deli case is jammed with sausages made from traditional methods passed down from one family member to another. On Saturday mornings you can wait in line for hunks of samples of their amazing meats, but you should definitely walk away with the garlic sausage—which will have you reeking pleasantly for the rest of the day. Or sit and gnaw on a sandwich while the smells blend with accordion music and Slavic banter from behind the counter.

    Tradition merged with innovation and a healthy sense of humor might be the best way to handle sausage-making. If that be true, then the folks at Sausage Sister & Me have found the key. Armed with time-tested techniques and recipes from their German Poppa Joe, Cherie Peterson and Merry Barry decided to create a sausage company based in Old World tradition and contemporary fun. Instead of going for the straight-faced and serious sausage-as-artesinal-art shtick, their sausage ingredients are zippy and the names even zippier. Try their Leave it to Cleaver (a.k.a Minnesota Nice) made with pork, wild rice, grated carrot, and onions, or Ring-A-Ding Risotto made with chicken, rice, artichokes, mushrooms, and parmesan cheese. You may have caught the two siblings hawking their Twisted Sister (porketta sausage wrapped in a twist of dough on a stick) at the State Fair last year. If not, you can catch them at the Minneapolis Farmer’s Market. Maybe sausage shouldn’t be the subject of an artful ode. Maybe it lends itself better to something more fun, more lively. I feel a limerick coming on…